intensity became more and more the key-note of thought and effort.

Back at her uncle's home, the uncle who was now even more convinced
that Ethel had never outlived the shock of the loss of her parents,
she found that honest study and devotion to her self-imposed tasks,
and a life of much physical comfort and rarely artistic surroundings,
were all failing to make living worth while. In fact, things were
getting into a tangle. She was becoming noticeably restless. Repose
was so lost that it was only with increasing effort that she could
avoid attracting the attention of those near. Even in church it would
seem that some demon of unrest would never be appeased and only could
be satisfied by constant changing of position. Thoughts of father and
mother, and the affair in Florence, intensified this spirit of unrest,
and few conscious minutes passed that unseen stray locks were not
being replaced. It seemed to be a relief to take off and put on, time
and again, the ring which had been her mother's. Even her feet seemed
to rebel at the confinement of shoes, and she became obsessed with the
impulse to remove them, even in the theater or at the concert. A
sighing habit developed. It had been growing for years into an air-
hunger, and finally all physical, and much of mental, effort developed
a sense of suffocation which demanded short periods of absolute rest.
Associations were then formed between certain foods and disturbing
digestive sensations. Tea alone seemed to help, and she became
dependent upon increasingly numerous cups of this beverage. Knowing
her history as we do, we can easily see how she had become abnormally
acute in her responses to the discomforts which are always associated
with painful emotions, and that emotional distress was interpreted, or
misinterpreted, as physical disorder. Each year she became more truly
a sensitive-plant, suffering and keenly alive to every discomfort,
more and more easily fatigued by the conflicts between emotions, which